Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of television entertainment, and more particularly, to allow precise textual input using a remote control.
Description of the Related Art
With today's internet-enabled television sets as well as hundreds of channels being offered by content providers, being able to input text to initiate a search for interesting content is more important than ever. Currently, when users want to input text on a TV they usually do so by using an on-screen keyboard to search and select letters they want. This would require the users to navigate across an on-screen keyboard resulting in multiple button presses to select next alphabet/character. Additionally, a pause is required after selecting an alphabet to indicate the selection before a subsequent character selection can be initiated.
Another way the users input text is by using predictive input concept. According to this concept that is most commonly used in mobile devices, such as cell phones, the numbers in a number pad are mapped to alphabets, and as the user selects the number buttons containing the letters, words that are part of the system dictionary appear so that user can select one of the presented words. This concept requires the system to create and store a dictionary of words to enable the system to support word prediction. Oftentimes, such word predictions are not always accurate and may lead to waste of time. Furthermore, it also needs additional memory to store the dictionary and additional processing to parse and process the user selections to predict the words.
Alternately, users may pair user input devices, such as a keyboard (an input device that is normally not associated with a living room where the television is), to the television. This would require installing authentication software to authenticate the user as well as device pairing. While there are different alternatives, including the options described above, they often take user out of a leaned-back experience and focus them on doing tedious work to express what they are looking for, require extra expense and setup, and can often be imprecise.
It is in this context that the embodiments of the invention arise.